Book Traveling Thursday: Mental Health Matters Edition

Book Traveling Thursdays is a weekly event hosted by Danielle’s Book Blog and The Girl Who Read Too Much. Each participant picks a book to match a theme, then finds the original cover, the covers for your country, and identifies favorite/least favorite covers. For more information, check out the Goodreads page.

This week’s theme is “Mental Health Matters!” and the goal is to pick a book that deals with mental health issues. This area is one of my favorite areas to read in, for some reason, and I enjoy memoirs as well as fiction. I have many favorites in this area, but the one I’m going to highlight this week is It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, a novel about a teenage boy who checks himself into the psychiatric ward at a hospital and ends up having to stay with the adults. He undergoes somewhat of a transformation and he also meets a girl. I’ve also heard it’s a fairly realistic account, and I really love the voice of the main character and the various secondary characters that flesh out the book. There’s also a decent movie adaptation, which is a rarity in the book world.

Original Cover

Other U.S. Covers

The first cover is basically the same as the original, but the shade of the background is a little different, so I included it. The other is the movie tie-in edition.

Favorite Covers

Italian//Original//Movie Tie-In

I’m not sure why I like the Italian cover so much, but I do. I think it’s the colors, and I really like the brain illustration. I like the original edition because of the image it conveys to me, of a boy with a lot going on in his head, but also including a map. I just like it. I’m usually not a fan of movie tie-ins either, but I really like this one because I feel like it kind of encapsulates the novel too.

Least Favorite Covers

Czech//French//German

The Czech cover is just terrible, in my opinion. The colors are weird, the photo is weird, and it doesn’t go with the book at all. The French cover is just very boring with only the words and nothing else. The German cover isn’t horrible…I just don’t quite like it.

Have you read this book? What did you choose for Book Traveling Thursday? Let me know in the comments!

Related

That Czech cover is strange, I’m not exactly sure what they are getting at, maybe the idea of how reality is distorted by our perception of it. Regardless the colors seem jarring. I really liked this book and I love the Italian cover and how it makes the brain look like a maze.